Apple claims Motorola misusing Qualcomm license

SAN FRANCISCO—Apple Inc. filed a lawsuit against Motorola Mobility Inc. Friday (Feb. 10) seeking to block Motorola from asserting patents against Apple in German lawsuit, according to reports.

The Reuters news service reported Friday that the lawsuit argues that the Motorola suit filed against Apple in Germany breaches the terms of Motorola's patent licensing agreement with communications chip vendor Qualcomm Inc.

Apple (Cupertino, Calif.) and Motorola Mobility, which is set to be acquired by Google Inc., are currently battling it out in numerous patent litigations in various places in the world.

According to the Reuters report, Apple's suit argues that, as a Qualcomm customer, Apple is third-party beneficiary of the licensing agreement between Motorola's and Qualcomm and that, under that agreement, Motorola cannot assert the patents against Apple.

I beleive Apple shot themselves in the foot by throwing the first punch trying to protect their market share. One on the previous commenters highlighted an important point - Apple has little or no innovation in the wireless space. Zero, zip, none. There are a few R&D giants out there who have significant innovation in wireless, and quite fairly so they need to protect their significant R&D investment. As yet, Apple may have refused to license from these Giants. Yet Apple has shipped significant volume resulting in significant revenue. If they are comming to the table only now to license they will be finding out that they owe back-license fees, but since they would not have negotiated BEFORE shipping in volume, the Giants would not be obligated to retro-actively license under FRAND since Apple would have deliberately infringed up until now. This opens up to punitive damages and retro-active non-FRAND terms. Apple's claim that Moto and Qualcomm cross-license seems like a desparate hail-mary move to me. I would be surprised if Qualcomm and others made this mistake, since their licensee is generally the phone manuficaturer not the chip manufacturer, as they get higher license fees from the total product BOM rather than the price of just the baseband chip. Is this fair to collect wireless royalties on a battery, screen and everything else that goes into a smartphone? Probably not to you or I, but this is the way the current world works. Apple made no friends by becomming litiguous, and now the sleeping Giants have awoken. To switch metaphors, I thunk Apple now has a frieght-train coming their way and it will be interesting to me to see how they avoid a collision. I might add all of the above that I wrote is hearsay, and would be interetsed to hear others inputs.

it seems to me that it started as market share protection for most of the larger companies, it was evident the minute you had them all buy obscure smaller firms for their IP in times gone by....
however it seems apple have made a rather scary monster for themselves as they dipped into the growing IP for sale markets and also got into the mass purchase of components, gambling that the old ARM slower business as usual would prevail and they would make a killing slowly releasing small improvement after small improvement.
as it turned out,the very act of releasing the first ARM cortex A8 ipad device on to the markets and bulk purchasing worked out fine for them, But that also had the effect (not seen in the x86 markets they were used to) of waking the many ARM giant's from their slumber and noticing the new profits to be made.
now the ARM giants are not known for being fast given they are more used to 10 and 15 year support cycles etc and they have a ways to go before they got the basic SOC package right for this new market (most missing PCiE for instance, or having that, and a far slower ram interface) but they will get there this year or next it seems and they dont have masses of contracted bulk older product to design around and shift right now like apple seem to do.
intersting times just ahead :)

Is it just me or has the world gone IP lawsuit happy? It seems every time I turn around there is another battle in courts being reported. Is this because companies are protecting their IP or protecting their market share? And while I am on the subject, does it seem like some of the patents being defended (or filed for that matter) border on the obvious? Using multiple fingers to navigate is as old as books with table of contents; why is doing that on a touch screen ANY different? Just saying.... Perhaps, we could use some common sense (NAH never happen)!